Vienna 1815 Introducing a European Security Culture
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Vienna 1815 Introducing a European Security Culture Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan and Brian Vick* Wine in Vienna In 1814–15, Hans von Gagern, German nobleman and freelance diplomat, acted as the plenipotentiary for the Prince of Orange, later King William I of the Netherlands, at the Congress of Vienna. Hosting numerous meetings at his rooms on the Bräunerstrasse in Vienna, where he outshone many other representatives by serving the most copious dinners and celebrated wines, he exemplified a new type of diplomat.1 Experienced, urbane, flexible, not attached to ancient forms and rituals, but pragmatic and to the point, he offered William straightforward advice: Your Royal Highness is entering the larger European system as one of its powers. From now on, your politics need to show your colour. One should not isolate oneself, and whoever does runs the risk of hurting oneself in the long run. [...] Name, honour and immediate interest dictate your Royal Highness to appear and be perceived as the defender of justice, as the champion and hope of the oppressed. Gagern urged William to stand up for the ‘security and interests’ of other, smaller nations and peoples.2 When consequently in June 1815 the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine was created, the Netherlands and * Beatrice de Graaf has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–13) / ERC Grant Agreement n.615313. The Editors wish to thank Susanne Keesman for her invaluable assistance as managing editor; and Yannick Balk, Celine Mureau and Annelotte Janse for their assistance in editing this volume’s many footnotes. We furthermore would like to thank John Kok for his excellent native editing of part of the chapters in this volume and Carla Spiegel for making the index. 1 Cf. M. Hundt, Die mindermächtigen deutschen Staaten auf dem Wiener Kongress (Mainz: Zabern, 1996), 105–10; E.E. Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy. The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815, vol.II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 177; H. Rössler, Zwischen Revolution und Reaktion: Ein Lebensbild des Reichsfreiherrn Hans Christoph von Gagern, 1766–1852 (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1958). 2 ‘Von Gagern to William I, Report III, Vienna 26 November 1814’; ‘William to Von Gagern, Brussels 14 December 1814’, National Archives The Hague (NL-HaNA), Algemene Staats- secretarie, 2.02.01, inv.no.6356. Cf. Correspondence between William and Von Gagern in Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (HStD), Familienarchiv der Freiherrn von Gagern, Files O11&B24. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, on 15 Apr 2020 at 08:26:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108597050.001 2 Vienna 1815: Introducing a European Security Culture the smaller principalities along the river – together with Prussia – accepted a legal constitution and a supranational court to settle disputes and conflicts along the Rhine. They thus mutually restrained one another from pursuing unilateral interests, such as restricting free passage, and fought smugglers together.3 The free trade regime was even extended to the Elbe and Polish rivers, and to the Po. This Rhine regime exemplifies how, following from the effervescent Con- gress of Vienna, the European powers established elementary conditions not only for the protection of the ‘status quo’4 and the regulation of interstate conflict through ‘political equilibrium’, as the literature on this era has it,5 but also for the creation of a system of collective security, the ‘Pax Europeana’,in which common European interests had to be debated, defined and defended together. Over two hundred years after the Final Act was concluded, it is time to remember, reassess and analyse the extent to which the Congress of Vienna produced new modes of security management, or what we can call new security cultures, combining pre-revolutionary, Napoleonic and post- Napoleonic ideas and practices of peace, stability and order in Europe.6 This volume aims to bring into focus the ways in which the Vienna Settlement went far beyond establishing a balance of power, and how a set of European insti- tutions, practices and agents, as well as ideals, principles and perceptions, embedded the territorial settlements in a European security culture. This volume’s primary objective is to analyse and explain the development of this ‘European security culture’ between 1815 and 1914. By this we mean the sum of mutually shared, and often conflicting, perceptions of vital interests 3 ‘Treaty of the Rhine Commission’, Rheinurkunden. Sammlung Zwischenstaatlicher Vereinbar- ungen, Landesrechtlicher Ausfuehrungsverordnungen und sonstiger wichtiger Urkunden über die Rheinschiffahrt seit 1803, vol.1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1918), 42–50. See for an overview of William’s and Von Gagern’s initiative B.A. de Graaf, ‘Second-tier Diplomacy: Hans von Gagern and William I in their quest for an alternative European order, 1813–1818’, Journal for Modern European History, 12:4 (2014), 546–66. 4 J.L. Klüber (ed.), Acten des Wiener Congresses in den Jahren 1814 und 1815, vol.II (Erlangen: Palm, 1817), 530–7. ‘Repose’ or ‘tranquility’ were Metternich’s favourite words. See ‘Metter- nich to Franz Georg, 8 June 1815’, Metternich family papers. Rodinný archive Metternissky. Acta Clementina, Correspondance politique Autriche. Cart 49, vol.5. Státní Ústrední Archiv Prague (SUA). Cf. M. Schulz, Normen und Praxis. Das Europäische Konzert der Großmächte als Sicherheitsrat, 1815–1860 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 74, 559, fn.90. 5 P.W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1994); Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy,3–17. 6 For detailed accounts of the Congress, see B.E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); W.D. Gruner, Der Wiener Kongress 1814/15 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014); R. Stauber, Der Wiener Kongress (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014); M. Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); G. Dallas, 1815. The Roads to Waterloo (New York: Random House, 2011). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, on 15 Apr 2020 at 08:26:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108597050.001 Vienna 1815: Introducing a European Security Culture 3 and threats, as well as the institutions and practices through which different agents acted together upon these ideas and expectations. These themes are addressed in the volume by numerous prominent scholars as well as a new generation of researchers in the field, as they trace the emergence of a new European security culture after the fall of Napoleon. In doing so we offer three main contributions to the scholarship on the Congress of Vienna and its consequences. Firstly, the essays sketch out a new and more detailed understanding of the nature of the Vienna Settlement of 1815 and its aftermath. By presenting the agreements as both the product of an emerging European security culture and as its founding, we focus on the institutions in which this culture was consolidated and on the actors who brought about and maintained these institutions, as well as their motives and ideas. More broadly, we illuminate the concepts, images and narratives of peace, order, conflict and danger that helped to call forth and legitimate this new security culture. Secondly, these studies contribute to debates within the history and the theory of International Relations about security, securitisation and security culture, which so far have focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.7 Here, we develop the historiography on the trajectories of securitisation in the nineteenth century, and in this way enrich the theoretical and conceptual insights into the workings and logics of security provided by IR studies. Finally, we expand the timeframe of the history of international cooperation well beyond the traditional threshold of histories of international governance, which generally view the Congress of Vienna merely as a prologue to a narrative that starts only in the second half of the nineteenth century.8 The essays in this volume ultimately show how already in the first quarter of the nineteenth century new multilateral cooperative institutions, habits and perceptions emerged, which contributed to a system of European collec- tive security. Such an approach directs attention to the range of institutions, agents and practices operating between the levels of the congress summit meetings and the traditional bilateral diplomacy from court to court. This new perspective also brings into focus how the caesura between the Congress system of 1814–22 and the subsequent Concert of Europe is less sharp than usually depicted, and the continuities considerably greater, with implications 7 E.g. B. Buzan, People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983); B. Buzan, O. Wæver and J. de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998); M. de Goede, European Security Culture: Preemption and Precaution in European Security. Inaugural lecture University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Vossius Press, 2011). 8 E.g. M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2012). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, on 15 Apr 2020 at 08:26:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108597050.001 4 Vienna 1815: Introducing a European Security Culture for our understanding of the long period of relative peace in Europe during the nineteenth century. Vienna 1815: The Emergence of a European Security Culture Postulating the emergence of a European security culture, in the broadest sense of the word, from 1815 onwards may seem counterintuitive.